Fall 2015 Graduate Courses

This course prepares graduate students for a successful teaching and learning experience in the foreign language classroom. The course addresses two major goals: introduce aspiring and beginning instructors to the most current methodologies of foreign language teaching and provide them with guidance and practical advice in the classroom. Special focus this semester will be on is classroom interaction with its various aspects. The course includes designing lesson plans for a learner-centered classroom, stating objectives based on standards of foreign language learning and nationally accepted proficiency guidelines, finding authentic materials for teaching, developing and reviewing graded assignments, analyzing and comparing different assessment tools, observing and reflecting upon one's own teaching and the teaching by others, and discussing personal experiences and the challenges of the language classroom. This course is taught in German with some assignments and readings in English.

This seminar focuses on a major interdisciplinary theoretical tradition in German writing, and its influence on selected thinkers of the last decades. Work of the Frankfurt School is among the most important 20th-century German-language contributions to such fields as sociology, political science, gender studies, film, cultural studies, and comparative literature. We will read texts by such key figures of the Frankfurt School as Walter Benjamin, Theodor W. Adorno, and Max Horkheimer, for their relevance to a number of disciplines, but we will give particular consideration to literary and aesthetic questions. To this end, we will also read texts by select authors to whom these figures responded (e.g. Baudelaire, Proust, Kafka, Beckett). In the second half of the course we will trace the influence of the first generation of the Frakfurt School in the work of such theorists as Jürgen Habermas, Michel Foucault, and Axel Honneth.

The Vienna of 1900—of Freud, Schnitzler, Hofmannsthal, Kraus, Musil, Mahler, Schönberg, Klimt, Schiele, and Wittgenstein—has become the stuff of myth. At the turn of the 20th century, the capital of the multilingual Habsburg Empire became a focal point for experimentation in literature, fine art, architecture, music, psychology, and philosophy. In this course, we will examine the relationship between aesthetic innovation and psychoanalysis, between politics and art, between the fin-de-siècle's powerful afterlife and its subsequent mythologization. How do the writers and artistis of the time speak about the pressures of urbanization, secularization, ethnic conflict, cosmopolitanism, sexuality, gender, and consciousness?